NASA sampled a 'fluffy' asteroid that could hold clues to our existence

As NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft descended toward asteroid Bennu to grab a sample of its surface materials, mission principal investigator Lauretta and his team knew the process would leave a mark–both on planetary science and on the boulder-filled surface of the rock itself. For its first-ever mission to retrieve a sample from an asteroid, the space agency selected a target that holds leftover, unchanged material from when the solar system formed...After examining that October 2020 touch-down in detail, planetary scientists determined that the material on the surface of Bennu must be fairly loosely packed, kind of like a dust bunny, Lauretta says. The details are described in a pair of papers published this week in the journals Science and Science Advances.